Chapter 33.
Caxton slapped the vest down on one of the desks in the briefing room a few hours later. Glauer stared at it as if there was some hidden message written on it, something he could read if he just looked hard enough.
“It’s a type IIIA ballistic vest,” Caxton said. “Standard police issue. Twaron fibers woven just right to reduce the impact of a bullet.” She rapped her knuckles on a spot just above where the wearer’s heart would be. “Then there’s a steel trauma plate here, just in case something gets through the fibers. It’ll stop pretty much any handgun bullet—.38 special, .44 Magnum, and just about any 9-millimeter round you can name, including the Parabellum rounds I load.”
Glauer tilted his head to one side. “So when you shot him, even at point-blank range—”
“He probably felt it, but it probably didn’t hurt.” She shook her head. “If you add this to how tough a vampire is anyway—I’m not exactly sure what would kill him.”
“Jesus,” Glauer swore. The man rarely ever swore. “But I’m confused. In the middle of a firefight he just threw it away. Why?”
“We weren’t shooting at him with handgun bullets anymore. This time we were using rifles. A rifle bullet would go through this like tissue paper,” she said, poking her index finger through a hole low on the left side, about where the wearer’s kidney might be. The cop who had spoken with her after the ambush had been right—he had hit Jameson, just not in his one vital spot.
“Jameson’s smart. We knew that already. He’s smart enough to understand his limitations. Most vampires don’t. They’re tougher than us, a hell of a lot faster, but they’re arrogant. They think they’re invincible, and that makes them cocky. Jameson is the least vain vampire I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe, but then again he did leave this behind, right? So now he’s unprotected. You can’t just buy these off the Internet. You need to be in law enforcement to get one, and nobody is going to sell a vest to a vampire.”
Caxton punched the vest, and not lightly. “That would be great, wouldn’t it? Fetlock’s forensics expert said pretty much the same thing. For about an hour I was happy. Then I got a call. A peace officer out of Lenhartsville had radioed in saying he had a subject that matched the description on my APB. Tall, vampire, naked, running along the side of I-78. He said he was going to investigate. Then he never radioed back.”
“Oh, no.”
Caxton nodded. “A second unit was dispatched to the scene. The peace officer was found drained of blood. The engine of his cruiser was still running, but the trunk had been torn open, as if with a pry bar.
You want to guess what was missing from the trunk?”
“A type IIIA ballistic vest?” Glauer asked.
Caxton touched the tip of her nose. “He doesn’t mind running around without any pants on, but Jameson feels naked without a trauma plate over his heart. He didn’t waste any time getting another one.”
Glauer stood back and rubbed at his mouth with his hands. “Another cop.”
“Another funeral,” Caxton agreed.
For a while they were both silent. The Glauer said, in a very soft voice: “At least it wasn’t magic.”
Caxton sat down at one of the other desks. “Yeah. I was beginning to think he had some kind of spell to protect him against bullets. Now I know better. Fat lot of good it does me. I can’t carry a rifle around with me every time I go out. Against what I’m carrying, he’s fucking bulletproof!”
“Hey,” Glauer said, stepping toward her. For a second she flinched backward, thinking he was going to give her a supportive hug. “Let’s not lose focus here. You did accomplish something last night.”
Caxton frowned. “What? I managed to not get myself killed? I scared a bunch of girls who seriously did not need more trauma?”
“You saved her life.”
They both turned and looked then at Raleigh, who sat in a far corner of the room, on the floor, with her arms around her knees. She had been offered a chair but refused it. She hadn’t said a word since Caxton led her out of the convent, except “yes” and “no” when she’d been asked if she was willing to come to Harrisburg, and then when she was asked if she was okay, respectively.
She was scared. Terrified. Caxton could understand that. She should be scared, frankly. It was only a matter of time before her father came after her again.
Caxton turned back to Glauer. “Yeah,” she said. “I saved her. She isn’t going to be safe, though, until I take Jameson down.”
“Okay. How do you want to proceed?”
Caxton scratched her chin. “Well, as I see it, there are two things I need to do. I need to go up to Syracuse and stop Jameson from killing Simon. Then I have to find Jameson’s lair. Shooting him doesn’t seem to work. So I have to catch him when he’s defenseless. If I can get to him during the daytime, if I can find his coffin, I can pluck his heart right out of his chest.”
“How’s the search for the lair coming?” Glauer asked.
She nodded appreciatively. She might be uncomfortable working with Fetlock, but he got results. “We had a list of sixty-odd places to check yesterday. The Feds were able to eliminate twenty of them yesterday, by actually going there and checking them in person. No sign of a vampire in any of them.
They’ll probably finish off the list today. I’d love to be able to go and check them out myself, but this’ll have to do—I’m going up to Syracuse as soon as I can, to secure Simon personally. We know Jameson is headed there next. It’s his last stop. If we don’t get him there—I have no idea where he’ll strike next, and everything gets a lot harder.”
“How far away is Syracuse?” Glauer asked.
“A little over four hours, if you’re driving. I don’t know how he travels.”
Glauer nodded. “That’s a long drive. Are you sure you’re up to it? You look like you need sleep.”
Caxton shrugged. “I used to work highway patrol. I would do twelve-hour shifts in a car back then. This I can handle. I have a couple of errands to run before I go, but I should be on the road before noon—which means I can arrive before nightfall. I might even have time to talk to Simon before his father tries to kill him.”
“Okay. I assume, from the way you’re talking, that I’m not going with you up there. I’ll keep working on the Carboy notebooks.”
“You haven’t turned up anything more from them, have you?” she asked.
Glauer’s face lit up, just a little. He gestured at the whiteboards and she saw, under Jameson’s portrait, a new picture. A picture of a slightly pudgy teenaged girl with spiky black hair (bright blue at the temples) and soft, very kindly-looking brown eyes.
“Who’s that? I’ve never seen her before.”
“Yes, you have,” Glauer told her. “Fetlock’s people came through with a partial facial reconstruction while you were gone. She was the half-dead that approached Angus.”
“Seriously?” Caxton looked closer at the picture. “I thought that one was male. She didn’t look anything like that.” Of course, if she’d been dead for a week, and she’d scratched off her own face—maybe.
“I took the partial face sketch they gave me and had some troopers run it by the missing persons database. She came up pretty fast. Cady Rourke, aged eighteen. Former resident of Mount Carmel.”
Caxton squinted. “That’s Carboy’s hometown.”
“Yes. And Cady Rourke was his first girlfriend. At least, that’s what he writes in the notebooks. I called her family and they said she and Dylan were just friends. Either way, what was Jameson doing with her?
Besides drinking her blood?”
“It’s a connection,” Caxton had to admit. “Tenuous, but it’s something.”
“I’d like to keep working on this lead. Unless you have something better for me to do.”
“Actually, I do. I need you to watch her.” Caxton didn’t so much as glance at Raleigh, but they both knew whom she was talking about.
“Oh. Okay,” Glauer said, nodding.
“Don’t just accept it like that. This is a pretty serious assignment. Jameson isn’t done with her, not yet.
He’ll try again to give her the curse. Normally when we work vampire sightings, I send you around to the back door. I put you on guard duty. This time you’ll be in the line of fire. You’re allowed to say no if you want to.”
“I can handle it,” the big cop said.
“You should keep her somewhere with lots of cops. Like right here. It’s possible that he’s tough enough to
